Are You Tapping When You Should Be Singing?

I attended a workshop for Made to Stick a while back and one of the ideas that really resonated with me was an exercise where half the room tapped out a popular song on our desks and the other half of the room had to guess the song. It was a miserable failure, which was the point. Without lyrics, melody and context, it was a near impossible task to guess the song. The tappers had all this context, the listeners had none.

The correlation to marketing is that as marketers we sometimes, perhaps often, forget that our customers and prospects usually have no context for our messaging. They haven't spent hours, days and weeks thinking about our products and learning the major features, much less the nuances of what we call things internally.

But we often assume they have.

Some examples I see every day of marketers or customer service folks who are tapping when they should be singing:

• My commuter rail line announces train delays by listing the train numbers instead of the train times. None of us know the train numbers but we're very familiar with the times.
• Emails that come from a random executive of a company. When I see a name I don't recognize in my inbox I usually a delete it or archive it without opening. I don't know who your CEO is and I don't know why I'd care.
• A detergent company that advertises "Fresh-Lock" or "Lift & Lock" on their package but explains nothing about what that actually means. Certainly the product team spent a lot of time coming up with the name and thought it was terrific, but no one outside of their brainstorming session knows what the heck it means.

My company, FieldAware wrestles with the issue all the time. We used to be convinced that every company that has workers driving around servicing customers knew what "field service management" meant. Turns out that many of them, especially in the small and mid-market, don't even think of themselves as "field service" companies. We had a lot of work to do:

A) Educating the market about what field service management is and

B) Researching the real terminology they were already using.

This serves as a wake-up call every day for our marketing team. If you're getting blank stares from prospects and customers (either literally or figuratively) there's a good chance you're tapping when you should be singing.